Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Towards a True Children’s Cinema: on ‘My Neighbor Totoro’
This is an excellent essay on Miyazaki’s / Studio Ghibli’s place in the canon of art cinema, the nature of “boredom” in the life of children, and how cinematic experiences can be so much more for children than our U.S. blockbusters lead us to believe.
When Roger Ebert asked Miyazaki about the “gratuitous motion” in his films—the bits of realist texture, like sighs and gestures—Miyazaki told Ebert that he was invoking the Japanese concept of “ma.” Miyazaki clapped three times, and then said, “The time in between my clapping is ma.” This calls to mind the concept of temps morts, or dead time, in the European art cinema of the 1960s. Temps morts is a pause, a beat, a breath, a moment that doesn’t advance the plot. But far from being dead, Miyazaki’s moments of “ma” are full of life—there is a simple joy in watching his worlds move. In “animating”—breathing life into—a world that looks like our own, Miyazaki carries forward a spirit from the very beginning of film history.
This is one of the greatest descriptions of the power of animation that I’ve read in a long time, and something that you can see in all of the small moments of Miyazaki’s films.
On children and boredom:
But I think some of the common thinking about children’s boredom and attention is inaccurate. Children are bored standing in line at the bank or the post office, certainly—they have no banking of their own to do, no mail of their own to send. But if you were to put a child and an adult in an empty room full of scattered objects, I suspect the adult would grow bored much faster. […] A child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest. Totoro is travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame.
Bonus: this essay is from an full Studio Ghibli issue of Bright Wall / Dark Room! I need to start reading this magazine.
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Decovar: A multistyle decorative variable font by David Berlow
Speaking of newfangled OpenType variable fonts, this Decovar “modular parametric control display font” is a nice example: a typeface that has an absurd set of elements that you can control programmatically, essentially creating a “skeleton” typeface with a large spectrum of embellishments (the terminals, the strokes, the contours are all adjustable, but still looks good by blending together smoothly).
Typography might be undergoing a revolution in the next few years!
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opentype.js
This is pretty cool: an OpenType parser written in JavaScript, enabling direct manipulation of a font’s letterforms and other typographical controls right in the browser (or node.js). I don’t think it would be used in production, but with type foundries cranking out OpenType variable fonts, it might be a fun playground / experimentation tool.
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Creating photorealistic images with neural networks and a Gameboy Camera
Good news, owners of Gameboy Cameras! New technology will now up-res and almost accurately colorize those grainy low-res spinach photos.
Jokes aside, there are some pretty amazing things being done these days in the world of neural net-trained image enhancements. See also this crazy research on using Google Brain to reasonably “zoom! enhance!” photos as small as 8×8 pixels (we used to laugh at crime drama TV shows and their unbelievable photo techniques…but now it’s getting pretty close…)
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The Real Life Popeye Olive Oyl and Wimpy
I never knew that some of the main characters from Thimble Theatre, the 1920s newspaper comic that birthed Popeye, were based on real people that E. C. Segar knew from his hometown! What the what! Above, photos of the real-life Popeye (Frank “Rocky” Fiegel), Olive Oyl (Dora Paskel), and J. Wellington Wimpy (J. William Schuchert). No sign of Bluto or Eugene the Magical Jeep.
Fiegel’s headstone now even has a pretty good Popeye etched into it. I don’t think I’d mind that.
(Via)
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A Call from Joybubbles – BBC Radio 4
A nice 30-minute radio documentary on famous phone phreaker Josef Carl Engressia, aka Joybubbles, with audio from his “Stories & Stuff” call-in recordings and interviews featuring John “Captain Crunch” Draper and “Jack the Ripper.”
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How Jim Varney and His Redneck Alter Ego Built a Lasting Legacy
If you read one medium-length essay about Jim Varney and the origins and triumphs of ‘Ernest P. Worrell’, make it this one.
The tactic of creating a nationwide “regional” advertising mascot working for disparate brands still seems pretty strange — I first saw Ernest when I was a kid in goofy early 1980s TV ads for the north Texas chain of Braum’s ice cream / dairy stores and assumed that he was from around there — but they struck on a character that was lasting enough to spin off multiple movies, a TV show, a lifetime of guest appearances, future voice work…
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Like Ezra Said (Ftrain.com)
In 2003 Paul Ford wrote a rather nice endorsement for colophons:
Rogers’ book terminates with a tremendous 3-page colophon, which wonders aloud if it is not perhaps “the longest colophon on record.” I take this personally, as a challenge for some day in the future, a challenge to create a colophon that transcends all colophons, a colophon that not only mentions the fonts of choice, but describes the sensuous lilt of certain descenders, offering prayers for good linespacing and a hymn to the golden ratio—a colophon that compares the kerned nestling of the “a” against the “W” in “Water” to the cuddling Madonna and child, and describes not only the paper that holds the ink but explains how the exact proportions of the lowercase “q” were debated so avidly that there was a stabbing in the foundry.
It is time for a colophon that explains how thousands of arbitrary hieroglyphs, the product of cognitive processes and some writer’s yearnings, when arranged on the page, form a community of relationships, a living colony redolent in turn of monk’s robes, boiling lead, and the chemical funk of the Linotronic spitting out its tongue of film. Time for a colophon that explains how a page of a book is a tangent off the great expanding unified sphere of language, with monkey grunts at its core and Web sites in its mantle. A colophon that explains how the linear strings of characters which make up prose or poetry can be broken into lines and arranged into sensuous comforts that salve the most polar loneliness. A colophon so overwritten as to make David Foster Wallace look like Raymond Carver, and by its very overwrittenness, absolutely transcendent, as dense as osmium and so obsidian-opaque in its beauty as to deny any reader whose soul is not purified a glance into its mysteries—a colophon which cannot be seen by the uninitiated, but is instead delivered to the pure of page by angels with san-serif wings at the moment of death, providing them with the sacred knowledge necessary to ascend to typographic heaven, where the true letterforms of which our own are only shadows are made manifest and the books are written using the infinite alphabet of the language of God.
(Via Robin Rendle’s excellent Adventures in Typography newsletter)
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Don’t Be a Sucker
Don’t Be a Sucker, a surprisingly (and sadly) relevant 1947 film from the U.S. Department of War about how xenophobia, suppression of minorities, and the obliteration of facts and education can quickly lead a country into ruin.
(I guess this wouldn’t have been made just a few years later, as McCarthyism swung into full gear?)
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What Keeps Al Jaffee, the Genius Behind Mad Magazine’s Fold-Ins, Going After 52 Years
If it ever gets too bleak, just remember that Al Jaffee is still making the world a better place through his incredible (and bitingly funny) illustrations for Mad at age 96 (!!!).
I was making fun of the fold-outs you’d see in Playboy or National Geographic or Life Magazine. They had these big, fancy, full-color fold-outs. Well, at Mad we didn’t have that kind of budget. So I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do the exact opposite? We’d do a cheap black-and-white fold in.
I love that the Fold-In started as another subversive bit of meta-humor about how “cheap” Mad magazine is.
On a side note, Columbia University acquired Jaffee’s paper archives a couple of years ago — I’d be amazing to look through that trove of 50+ years of sketches.
